Feats of Memory

Manawatu Times, Volume LVI, Issue 7066, 27 January 1933, Page 11

Feats of Memory

EEMARKABLE MUSICIANS. Everyone, gays ]a Eochefoucauld, complains of Ms memory, No ono complains of Ms judgment. But the Frenchman wds writing boforo the advent of the virtuoso of the piano. . He is not as others are. His memory may give him ground for genial self-depreciation in other'things. But—and it is a very large but —once ho becomes a pianist !ho ceases to belong to all the world of ttmnramity included in Eochefoucauld’s (observation. His memory then is no longer a lever which by depression may (exalt that nobler quality of the mind — judgment (writes PI. E. Wortham, in (the London Daily Telegraph). When Liszt copied the example of his Native Tziganes, and started to play from memory at his Tecitals, ho set a fashion which has now come to bo a matter of course. To play the piano Slow is to play it from memory. I do siot for. a moment suppose that Herr jSchnabel, if you, asked him, would ad-

mit to there being anytMng the least remarkable in. his thus playing the whole of the Beethoven sonatas. So faT, indeed, from his thinking it so, ho told mo tho other day how once, when he was in Hanover he happened to see a poster advertising just such a series of piano recitals. Tho pianist was Gieseking —then still a student —fledging his wings with this eagle flight in his nativo town.

Were Herr Schnabel to make an inventory of the whole wealth of piano music stored in that accurate mind, Beethoven’s sonatas would jn-obably form only a modest fraction, I have heard it claimed by Professor Tovey (who knows his Beethoven as well as any other living musician)that he car-, ries the whole of Bach’s clavier music in'Ms head—suites, partitas, the ‘Fortyeight,’ and all. Mr HaTold Samuel also must be pretty well up in his Bacih, who teases the memory as Beethoven never does.

Herr Horiz-Bosenthal has the whole of Chopin by heart. He will give you the context of any two bars, though M. .Cortot jestingly, .fried hi^

with a couple consisting only of a rest ho had to bo given the tonality as well before ho could identify the particular bars in the B flat minor scherzo. Mr Herbert Fryer is another master pianist who could probably write out the whole of Chopins works if every existing copy and plate of Ms music wore destroyed. I need say nothing about tho seamy side of pianists memories. They fail much more often than the public think —and if pianists could afford to bo candid wo might hear them, too, justifying la Eochefoucauld’s epigram.